Woolf: Ski industry searches for growth

According to a Ski Vermont report released June 15, 2017, visitor numbers during the 2016-17 ski season were up from the previous season due, in part, to higher snowfall.
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Skiers and snowboarders make their way up the mountain at Stowe Mountain Resort in February 2017 after Colorado-based Vail Resorts announced it was buying Stowe for $50 million.(Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS FILE)Buy Photo

It’s July, summer is in full swing and only the most diehard skiers and riders—and some economists—think about winter. Economists because the Vermont Ski Areas Association recently released the numbers on the 2016-2017 ski season, which showed a vastly improved season compared to the previous year. Nearly 4 million people skied on the state’s slopes this past season, up more than 20 percent from the year before.

Any business would be pleased with a 20 percent growth rate, except when that growth follows one of the worst years in recent memory, as it did. Compared to the almost snowless winter of 2015-16 nearly anything would look good.

But a deeper look at the state’s ski industry shows that it faces serious challenges. Last year’s 3.92 million skier days (one person skiing for one day) shows that although the 2016-17 season was much better than the year before, the ski season was actually mediocre when we look back more than one year. Last year’s skier days was the fourth lowest of the past two decades and the sixth lowest in the last 30 years.

Vermont’s ski industry exploded between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s, growing from one million skier days to more than five million at its peak. But in the 1990s, 2000s, and thus far in the current decade, the industry has been stuck at an average of about 4.1 million skier days per year. The number of skier days has bounced around recently: more than 4.5 million in 2013, 2014, and 2015, then the disaster of 2016, when visits fell by more than 30 percent to only 3.2 million.

The ski industry is important not just to the ski areas themselves, but to a host of businesses that depend on high-spending out of state visitors who stay at inns and hotels, eat at restaurants, and buy and maintain second homes. Those businesses, in turn, provide employment to thousands of Vermonters. That’s especially true in southern Vermont, close to the population centers in Boston and New York, where the ski industry is more important economic engine than in northern Vermont or the Burlington area.

In 2016, when the ski industry had its worst year in decades, restaurant and hotel employment during the winter ski months fell from the previous year. This past year, by contrast, saw employment in those industries grow by more than 7 percent, a huge increase. Similarly, state tax revenues from spending at restaurants and hotels during the winter of 2017 brought significantly more money into state coffers than in 2016.

As the last two decades have shown, the ski industry is mature and like any mature industry, it’s hard to find new sources of growth. The industry is responding to that challenge but it faces a lot of competition. People have many choices about how to spend their vacation dollars. Are they going to spend it on winter or summer vacations? In winter they can ski in Vermont, or choose New Hampshire or Colorado or Canada. Or they can choose a beach vacation in Florida or Mexico or a Caribbean cruise.

Most winter tourists come from the northeastern U.S. and, just like Vermont, it is an aging population with fewer people in the age groups that comprise most of Vermont’s traditional skiers and riders. Moreover, what population growth there is in the northeast comes primarily from immigrants, which is not the traditional skiing population.

If the industry is to grow — or even maintain the current number of skiers, it’s going to have to figure out how to attract older skiers and younger, affluent immigrants.